Outages or shutdowns are the most critical aspect of maintenance reliability. Through careful planning and standardization, any organization can excel at managing outages. Randy Pound runs through some key steps to consider before, during and after an outage.

First, the reliability and production team must work together not only during an outage but also through daily activities. Performing as one team at all times will lead any company to success.

Each organization should consider the following:

Before an outage:

– Make sure each individual has the applied skills to handle their aspect of the outage

– Make sure that the available parts are fit for the service

-Have each technician ready to jump in when equipment is shut down in order to reduce loss of profitability

During an outage:

– Use available technicians that are skilled to handle each specific outage

I’m a Weather Channel junkie…I’m fascinated by weather in general and how it affects our lives, every day, all around the globe. What’s even more fascinating to me is how the meteorologists are able to accurately (well, almost always) predict weather conditions for nearly every corner of our planet, days—sometimes weeks—in advance.

Thousands of years ago, people simply watched the sky to determine weather patterns. As the centuries progressed, so did meteorological technology. Now armed with satellites, computer modeling, and analytic skills, meteorologists have the tools they need to report accurate forecasts to help us plan our days and not get caught in a rainstorm without an umbrella.

Weather forecasting got me thinking about predicting asset conditions—even imminent failure—and the tools that we have at our fingertips to help avoid problems. Having the right tools to monitor and measure the condition of your assets can help detect when changes occur in an asset’s condition and enable you to predict and address problems before they occur (like take an umbrella to work when there’s rain in the forecast). Just like meteorological technology, the tools and technologies used to monitor assets have increasingly become more sophisticated and give us a real-time view of how they operate on a daily basis.

Sheila Kennedy of Plant Services wrote this great article about advancements in predictive tools and products being delivered by a number of companies, including Infor. The tools feature improvements in connectivity, usability, portability, and affordability.

What technology and/or tools do you use to monitor your assets and circumvent problems? What advances have you seen in the evolution of monitoring processes and analysis? I welcome your thoughts and ideas.

Imagine this: You have a work order software system that creates work orders without human intervention. How would this benefit your organization?

Let’s look at a couple of examples. Let’s say you have a building management system, or a production line automated by programmable logic controllers (PLCs) or some type of monitoring hardware. The data feeds into your work order management system, which applies intelligence to this data. When an event occurs that a certain rule identifies as an anomaly, the system automatically creates a work order containing the template information on what the problem is and how it needs to be corrected. The work order is then routed to the appropriate department for correction. The work order is completed, and the fault is documented. So, as a maintenance or reliability expert, how would this benefit you?

Let’s take a look at another example where such automation doesn’t exist. On one asset you have two failures that have the same failure code combination within a two-week period. How can a mechanic identify that this failure already happened last week? That mechanic would have to go into the work management system, pull up that equipment record, and look at the history to identify the problem. But what if the system kept track of these failures and automatically notified the mechanic that this is the same failure code combination?

As technology advances and CMMS or EAM evolves, the automation features improve. With the right asset management system in place you can add automation to your maintenance processes creating a more productive maintenance organization.

Are you implementing more automation into your maintenance processes? What efficiencies are you realizing? Please leave a comment to this post. I’d like to hear your thoughts and ideas.

I recently spent some time helping a well-known yogurt manufacturer improve their visibility into their daily maintenance process. Their CMMS product is 10 years old, not updated with the correct patches, and the reporting software is equally as ancient.

The manager in charge of maintenance performance seemed less stressed this time as compared to last. During my first visit he was newly appointed as the person who would take their CMMS and revamp the plant maintenance performance within a few months. I’ve seen that type of pressure placed on people before. So many times, in fact, that I have a name for it….CMMS (could mean my salary). Because if this guy fails, he is probably out of a job.

So of course their is a wonderful transference of that same pressure onto the consultant who the plant was so kind as to bring in and help the guy with a CMMS on his forehead. “Could Mean My Salary”, in case you forgot.

Well this yogurt man had actually taken that old CMMS and incorporated the changes we had identified during the first visit. So needless to say he was much more relaxed, knowing that his upper management team believed in him (and me…through transference).

To make a long story short, and then sum up my point, this latest visit proved to be successful as we took old reporting software and used it to improve maintenance processes weaved throughout an equally rickety CMMS product. More specifically, we eliminated 8 labor hours per week that were previously “empty” labor hours spent transferring data from the CMMS to Excel then comparing to a production schedule, etc.

We took a single report and with prompts made it variable enough to manage all scenarios. So the 8 hours transferring data was replaced with a single report that could be launched at any time to pull the required information LIVE.

The Point? CMMS either “could” mean your salary, or it can also “justify” your salary and make it grow. And having the latest, greatest CMMS system is not a guarantee or precursor to success. It’s more about the basic concepts of “minimal touch” information gathering and maintenance process efficiency. If you want to learn more, email me directly: publish@eamuniversity.com